British Poetry 1660-1914

This course is a survey of British poetry from the Restoration period to beginning of the 20th century, with an emphasis on the 18th and 19th centuries. We will study shifts in poetic form and how forms like the epic, ode, pastoral, elegy, ballad, lyric, and sonnet are reinvented over the course of two centuries. Key themes will be nature, love, death, sex, war, and revolution as they map onto particular historical and political moments. Poets will include: Milton, Dryden, Rochester, Behn, Pope, Swift, Gray, Goldsmith, Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge, Byron, the Rossettis, Hopkins, Hardy, Yeats, T.S. Eliot.